Some EA orgs seem to be ma­tur­ing to the point at which they have multi-mil­lion dol­lar bud­gets.

One con­cern: Big donors of­ten do not fully fund an or­gani­sa­tion and it is good for or­gani­sa­tions to di­ver­sify fund­ing from differ­ent sources. This might lead to a situ­a­tion where big EA orgs are hov­er­ing up dona­tions from many small EA donors. This money is likely to be very valuable coun­ter­fac­tu­ally, be­cause it could be given to smaller EA pro­jects or high-im­pact non-meta causes. EA orgs might want to try to pro­fes­sion­al­ize their fundrais­ing efforts and di­ver­sify their fund­ing by reach­ing out to more non-tra­di­tional EA donors. For in­stance, like other big non-prof­its, EA orgs might want to hire in­sti­tu­tional fundraisers to tap into larger grants from big foun­da­tions other than the usual sus­pects (e.g. Vox’s Fu­ture Perfect has re­ceived a $380k grant from the Rock­efel­ler Foun­da­tion), or get aca­demic or gov­ern­ment grants (e.g. the aca­demic in­sti­tute GPI at Oxford Univer­sity wants to hire some­one to do “Fundrais­ing, par­tic­u­larly from pri­vate donors.”).

I think many or­ga­ni­za­tions try to raise money at the end of the tax year (“giv­ing sea­son”), be­cause many peo­ple put off their giv­ing un­til then. If they are still try­ing to raise money in 2019, that sug­gests that they didn’t hit their fundrais­ing tar­gets for 2018′s giv­ing sea­son.

Maybe for each or­ga­ni­za­tion, we could gather info on how long that or­ga­ni­za­tion has been do­ing fundrais­ing for its lat­est round, and how suc­cess­ful it has been so far?

For in­stance, like other big non-prof­its, EA orgs might want to hire in­sti­tu­tional fundraisers to tap into larger grants from big foun­da­tions other than the usual sus­pects

I’ve looked into this a few times and it does seem like it will be­come a promis­ing chan­nel. In par­tic­u­lar from the big donors that do very large checks (>$500k). At least one org I know is ex­per­i­ment­ing with hiring a full-time grant-writer. I cur­rently think it won’t work well for most EA orgs for some time to come.

Worth not­ing that most big foun­da­tions have large sr. man­age­ment time over­heads and of­ten re­quire de­sign­ing be­spoke pro­jects just for that foun­da­tion. Grant-writ­ers also gen­er­ally have slow pay­back pe­ri­ods (>1-2 years not rare, more if first one doesn’t work out), are very tricky to eval­u­ate dur­ing hiring and ex­pire once you run out of foun­da­tions /​ ma­jor donors to ap­ply to (most don’t do much re­peat fund­ing). Not in­sur­mountable challenges.

An al­ter­na­tive is to hire one-off fundraisers who ap­proach lesser known ma­jor donors for you, I think that may be promis­ing but re­quires a large time in­vest­ment to train that per­son to talk about your char­ity. They also still re­quire a large amount of Sr. mgmt’s time (non-foun­da­tion ma­jor donors will gen­er­ally want to speak to the founders and most those con­ver­sa­tions will end up be­ing a no) and are more likely to gen­er­ate one-off fund­ing rather than re­peat.

It may be that ex­pand­ing philan­thropic ad­vi­sory within EA in gen­eral is more promis­ing. Whilst not speci­fi­cally fo­cused on rais­ing funds for EA orgs, an in­creased num­ber of smart and best-ar­gu­ments-aware donors in the space in gen­eral could well have a similar re­sult for less sr. mgmt time cost.

It could also be that hav­ing a semi-cen­tral­ised fundrais­ing team that man­ages a team of gen­er­al­ist fundraisers that are shared and spe­cial­ist fundraisers that each work for a differ­ent large EA org could work re­ally well. Train them all up in tan­dem and work out how to eval­u­ate them, fo­cus on >$300k checks from ma­jor donors but also have a grant-writer or two shared be­tween them, hire most tal­ent from main­stream pools, etc., We looked into some­thing like this to func­tion across all the GiveWell char­i­ties but it ul­ti­mately looked like it wouldn’t work.

It doesn’t seem un­likely that that last op­tion never makes sense, be­cause by the time you have orgs large enough to jus­tify the above ($5m-$10m pa), those orgs also or­gan­i­cally start to hire their own in­ter­nal fundraisers and grant-writ­ers just to meet their large bud­gets.